Since Statehouse Republicans passed a law in 2021 requiring Ohio Supreme Court candidates to run under party labels on the ballot, reversing a century-old nonpartisan approach, Republicans have gone six for six.
If their undefeated streak continues, they’ll achieve the historically rare feat of total one-party control, a first since 2010.
Two seats are up for election, but Democrats’ best chance is Jennifer Brunner, an incumbent and longtime political ally of Sherrod Brown, who has won statewide in both Supreme Court and secretary of state races.
Brunner won a six-year term in 2020, the last time the party won statewide in Ohio. That said, she lost a separate race for the chief justice seat in 2022 by about 10 points, a margin that has more or less held in every Supreme Court contest since.
In an interview, she said President Donald Trump has been wildly successful at branding Democrats as liberals who “legislate from the bench” in the eyes of many voters.
Democrats in the 2010s managed a modest run of success in the then-nonpartisan judicial races. But the new party label requirement and the political unpopularity of Democrats statewide in Ohio have reversed nearly all of those gains. And in the even lower-profile court of appeals races, experienced judges of both parties with decades of political success wound up losing their first races running as explicit partisans.
“And the thing is that ‘liberal Democratic judges’ carries with it, a whole bag of ugly,” Brunner said. “And so, you know, people see Democrat on the ballot next to a judge’s name, and they, in at least in many parts of Ohio, say, ‘No, that’s a biased judge.’”
The stakes are high as the next crop of justices will take up major cases on Ohio’s new constitutional guarantee of abortion access, its new $1 billion voucher program and countless other high-profile and often divisive issues.
After Republicans imposed the partisan label requirement, Brunner filed a lawsuit in federal court to block it. Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Benita Pearson, an appointee of President Barack Obama, rejected Brunner’s arguments that the new requirement violated her constitutional rights. Brunner declined to say whether she plans to appeal.
She’s running against Republican Colleen O’Donnell, a former Franklin County Common Pleas Court judge, whose website also notes she “consistently ordered the removal of illegal aliens” as a federal immigration court judge in Texas.
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Who is Jennifer Brunner?
Brunner, 69, has worked in and around Ohio politics since the 1980s, when she was a lawyer for then-Secretary of State Sherrod Brown. Both their careers are so long and intertwined that this isn’t even the first time they have shared ballot space – in 2006, Brown mounted his first Senate run while Brunner ran for secretary of state. They both won.
After the term, Brunner angled for a U.S. Senate seat but lost in a primary, facing opposition from then-Senate Democrats’ point lawmaker Bob Menendez, who has since been convicted of bribery and related offenses. She has served as a county and appellate judge, while occasionally deploying to countries like Serbia, Sri Lanka and Egypt providing different kinds of legal work with USAID, the since-shuttered federal aid organization.
She won a six-year term in 2020, carrying 55% of the vote as an ostensibly nonpartisan candidate, even as Republicans trounced Democrats in the presidential race and on down the ballot.
Between 2020 and 2022, Brunner swung from winning by 10 points to losing by 10, a seismic swing that retained enough power in 2024 enough to knock off incumbent Democrats Michael Donnelly and Melody Stewart as well.
Outside challengers felt it too, all losing by roughly the same margin. That includes Marilyn Zayas, who lost in 2022 and is running again this year against incumbent Republican Justice Dan Hawkins.
As the last Democrat remaining on the bench, Brunner is regularly the lone dissenting voice. That includes a recent case where she sided with a woman who was charged with obstruction of justice when she resisted a police attempt to place her in involuntary mental health commitment. Or the case last year where she dissented from the six Republicans who said the nitrogen gas that suffocated a security guard at a steel plant was non-toxic and thus doesn’t trigger a more generous workers’ compensation payout, logic that she wrote “flies in the face of reason.”
“I feel like I owe it to the public to present a point of view that I truly believe needs to be heard,” she said. “I like to think that perhaps I write for the future. Because at some point in the future, as views change in the law, as society changes, they may say, you know, something Brunner wrote 10 years ago, that might be a way to go now.”
Ohio laws prohibit judges from taking office if they’re 70 or older. Brunner turns 70 in February, which would be less than two months into her term.
Despite Democrats’ recent experiences with aging leaders, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who died in office at 90, and President Joe Biden, who dropped his re-election bid at 81 amid mounting concerns over his age and vitality, Brunner said she’s not sweating it. She’s working on her PhD while serving on the state Supreme Court and said that speaks for itself.
“I just didn’t think it was appropriate for me to walk away at this point,” she said.
Former Columbus-area judge Colleen O’Donnell challenges Brunner
Colleen O’Donnell is running against Brunner as a Republican after winning a crowded primary.
She previously worked as a Franklin County Common Pleas Court judge, at first as an appointee of Gov. John Kasich before winning election outright. She lost in November 2022, later finding work as an immigration judge in Texas. She was appointed by the administration of President Joe Biden, a fact that has caused her some grief in conservative Blaze Media, which reportedly obtained a clip of O’Donnell denying to a crowd that she had been appointed by Biden.
According to Border Crossing Law, a judicial tracking website operated by an immigration attorney, O’Donnell heard 118 cases in total while serving there. Of 16 requests for asylum she considered, she didn’t grant any.
O’Donnell has pedigree on her side – her father is Terrence O’Donnell, a Republican who sat on the court from 2003 to 2018.
This year, most unions are backing Brunner, while business and insurance groups, police and Ohio Right to Life are backing O’Donnell.
Reached through a campaign spokeswoman, O’Donnell declined an interview request.